Beyond Words: The Visual Turn in Jacobean England

Pavneet Aulakh
English
UC Santa Barbara

This project begins by rethinking the relationship between the sciences and the humanities in the early seventeenth century. While recent scholarship has increasingly acknowledged an overlap between the two fields, scholars largely continue to conceive of them as manifesting two discreet cultures with distinct allegiances and forms of knowledge making. Reading Francis Bacon’s treatises on natural philosophy alongside the poetry and drama of Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and George Herbert, Aulakh examines how all these writers developed sensuous, often visual and emblematic, representational strategies to surmount what Bacon identified as the epistemological limitations of language. This dissertation is largely a generational study, focusing on a group of writers who, with the exception of Donne, were loosely affiliated with Bacon’s project as advocates and translators. Nonetheless, it also seeks to position these writers within a larger intellectual history. Not only do their efforts anticipate a mid seventeenth-century shift towards image-based learning in English pedagogy, but they also inform the emphasis late seventeenth-century philosophers (Locke and Hobbes, for instance) would place on the epistemological centrality of vision.